GULag:
The Soviet lagers


GULag is the acronym, introduced in 1930, for Gosudarstvennyj Upravlenje Lagerej, the central administration for collective labour camps. The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn adopted the expression "the Gulag Archipelago" to encompass the entire Soviet concentration camp system, which numbered 384 lagers.
Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Soviets started to build concentration and forced labour camps for political dissidents in the most inhospitable regions of the USSR, from the Solovki islands to the Kolyma mines, in Siberia.
The first victims sent to the gulags were the "class enemies": the Russian aristocracy, businessmen, landowners, the Orthodox clergy and in general any groups considered privileged. Later the "pogroms" affected all sectors of Soviet society, including the prisoners of war who had survived the Nazi camps and the scientists and engineers required to build dams, canals, roads and towns, to work the mines or produce timber. Climatic conditions were extreme, hunger, arbitrary shootings, back-breaking labour and the psychological violence used to bend the prisoners’ will led to an average mortality rate of 10% in the gulags, and 30% in Kolyma.
Sentences were handed down without trial by the "troikas", administrative organs composed of three political commissars, who judged the "enemies of the people " according to article 58 of the new penal code. Terror – already used by Lenin as a means for keeping society under control – was taken a step further by Stalin and the Soviet regime effectively became a totalitarian State. The GULag system was used as an economic instrument for exploiting manpower, but was above all a weapon of political repression wielded via the NKVD, the powerful secret police, later the KGB. It was to remain an effective tool for the exercise of power throughout the history of the Soviet Union.
During the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, the entire class of small farmers known as the kulaks was liquidated, reduced to starvation by having their harvests requisitioned and by the famine induced to exterminate them, like the one in Ukraine that caused millions of deaths and has been defined as a "genocidal crime".
Only after the death of Stalin and the rise of Kruschov – with the secret report to the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 – were numerous political prisoners released and rehabilitated. The number of camps was reduced to 37, but the final closure of the "Gulag Archipelago" only came in 1987 under Gorbachov, two years before the fall of communism.
The final figures of this mass extermination are still not clear but it is thought to have affected between 20 and 40 million people. The “Memorial” Study Centre, set up in Moscow after the fall of the regime, has gradually been gathering archive material and recording the testimony of survivors in order to make a precise and rigorous historical reconstruction. However, this is still proving to be a long and arduous task.